Carlos Kalmar, conductor for the Grant Park Music Festival Orchestra and Chorus.

Talk about a piece of music ripped from the headlines.

It so happens that actual headlines taken from back issues of the newspaper you hold in your hands – or are reading online – are sung by a large mixed chorus in a new composition that is to receive its world premiere at Millennium Park as part of the summer's first weekend of concerts at the Grant Park Music Festival.

The new work, "Only Converge: An Exaltation of Place," was commissioned by the festival as one of two new chorus and orchestra pieces celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Grant Park Chorus. It will have its first performances Friday and Saturday nights at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion by the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus, with principal conductor and artistic director Carlos Kalmar at the helm.

As they gathered the raw materials for a big choral work saluting the founding of the chorus in 1962, the American composer Michael Gandolfi and his longtime librettist, Dana Bonstrom, decided to make the first movement, "Chicago, Summer of '62," a lighthearted look at news and feature stories that ran in the Chicago Daily Tribune (as it was known back then) around the time the chorus debuted at the old Grant Park bandshell.

Bonstrom, a native Minnesotan who had spent many years in Chicago as a young man, searched through the newspaper's archives, pulling out various clips and combined the headlines in rhymed couplets. Gandolfi then set them to music echoing big-band jazz and studded with references to the pop culture of the day – everything from a Rat Pack scat to TV's "The Jetsons" theme song.

One rhyme proclaims: "Trib's College Mixer a Swinging Scene/Cops Bust Fifty Beer Party Teens." Later on in the opening section we hear the chorus lamenting the Cubs' losing streak – some things never change – to the accompaniment of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and a drinking song popular in the city's Czech and Slovak communities at the time.

In a phone interview from his home in Boston, where Gandolfi serves as chairman of the composition department at the New England Conservatory of Music, the 55-year-old composer said Kalmar essentially gave him a blank slate before he and Bonstrom began crafting their affectionate homage to the chorus, city and park. "Basically Carlos told me I could write whatever I wanted, as long as it wasn't a requiem," Gandolfi said.

The composer said he actually welcomes audience members breaking into applause at the end of the slam-bang first movement. Gandolfi has designed the piece so that the chorus proceeds without interruption into the second portion, silencing the applause with whooshing sounds depicting the windy gusts that are forever identified with Chicago.

Ushering in the grand and serious second movement, "Millennium Rising," those winds prepare the listener for an epic journey spanning millions of years – from the evolution of Lake Michigan and the development of the Chicago lakeshore, to the founding of Grant Park in 1935 and the opening of Millennium Park nearly 70 years later.

The male voices of the chorus capsulize the lake's 600-million-year evolution while the female voices recount the habitation of Chicago's marshy footprint. All voices later converge to evoke the massive storm surge that struck the lakefront in 1954. It all culminates in a majestic chorale extolling the Pritzker Pavilion's "silvered sails," the Crown Fountain's "gargoyle's gaze" and the various other wonders of the city's newest urban playground.

"The ending isn't intended to make you jump out of your seat, but, rather, to elevate you and make you aware of your surroundings," Gandolfi said. "If the first movement is rather frivolous, the second is like a big prayer, a joyous moment. When the piece ends, you can walk right out into what was evoked in the music."

It seems only fitting that a score celebrating the convergences that made Chicago the unique and thriving heartland metropolis it is today should be by a composer whose music also represents a convergence of diverse forces.

Gandolfi's stylistic thumbprint owes much to the fact that he's a self-taught guitarist who played rock and jazz from an early age before switching to formal composition studies at the New England Conservatory and the Tanglewood Festival. In many a Gandolfi score it's hard to tell where the improvisational skills he developed early on leave off and where his classical compositional training kicks in. And the composer insists he's fine with that.

Indeed, the rhythmic energy that pulses through a Gandolfi score can be traced to his adolescent fondness for jazzed-up Bach and the Beatles – and to the fact he was, by his own admission, a hyperactive child. He recalls how, as a young boy, he would drive his parents to distraction by constantly rocking back and forth on the living room furniture.